Αρχική | | | Προφίλ | | | Θέματα | | | Φιλοσοφική ματιά | | | Απόψεις | | | Σπουδαστήριο | | | Έλληνες | | | Ξένοι | | | Επιστήμες | | | Forum | | | Επικοινωνία |
Making a Difference |
|
Συγγραφέας: Pamela Hieronymi Pamela Hieronymi: Making a Difference (pdf, 18 pages) John Martin Fischer has done more than anyone (including, I think, Harry Frankfurt himself) to promote reflection on what he calls “Frankfurt-type cases;” it is obvious how fruitful reflection on these cases has been in Fischer’s own work (familiarity with which I here take for granted). Fischer draws from the Frankfurt-type cases two central, crucial, insights about what is important for freedom of the sort required for moral responsibility. The first is that what matters is what actually happened, not what might have happened: we need to focus on what Fischer calls the “actual sequence.” The second is related: responsibility requires a kind of freedom that includes control, and so, rather than focus on mere possibility, we must try to understand the relevant notion of control. These insights have led Fischer sensibly to dismiss appeals to what he calls mere “flickers of freedom” as a way of addressing the Frankfurt-type cases. Throughout, Fischer has also been motivated by “the idea that our basic status as distinctively free and morally responsible agents should not depend on the arcane ruminations—and deliverances—of the theoretical physicists and cosmologists.”1 However, far from dismissing incompatibilism, Fischer (together, at times, with Mark Ravizza) instead advances a well-known alternative, semi-compatibilism. With his semi-compatibilism, Fischer distinguishes between different sorts of control and identifies the sort he believes required for our responsibility: what he calls “guidance control.” Guidance control is, roughly, the kind of control we exercise over our actions when they are the result of a “moderately reasons-responsive” mechanism that is appropriately our own. Guidance control, Fischer argues, is compatible with the truth of determinism, because determinism is compatible with both ownership and moderate reasons responsiveness. |
|
|